Why Anti-Gay Groups Are So Eager To “Let The Voters Decide” In Minnesota

May 19, 2011 4:10 pm ET by Carlos Maza

Anti-gay groups are hard at work in Minnesota, where the
state legislature is expected to vote this week on a bill that would put a constitutional amendment defining marriage as betweeen
one man and one woman before voters in 2012. Groups like the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM) have been championing the bill by relying on
one of theirfavoritetalkingpoints: It
should be up to the voters to decide the definition of marriage:

Much has already been said about
the moral
and legal
problems with putting the rights of a disempowered minority group up for a public vote.

By framing the debate around the importance of direct
democracy, however, NOM has been able to work toward restricting LGBT rights
without having to appear explicitly anti-gay.

In reality, these referendums very rarely end up actually
reflecting the will of the voters.

Instead, they tend to be co-opted by well-financed special
interest groups like NOM that flood voters with misleading and outright false
information in order to inflate public opinion against minority groups
(in this case, the LGBT community). As law professor Paula Abrams wrote in 2008:

One can readily conclude that
lawmaking by initiative, the manifestation of unchecked majority will, carries
a high risk of producing bad laws. The “bad law” risk posed by the initiative
is not simply that of generic poor policy. The absence of the deliberative
process can leave the voters with profoundly inaccurate information. False
information may be an unintended byproduct of the public campaign, or it may be
deliberately disseminated for political advantage. Deliberate dissemination
of false information can be a particularly potent and harmful strategy to
agitate the majority against minority groups. Immune from legislative or
executive review, initiative campaigns may rely on appeals to voter prejudice.
[Oregon Law Review, Vol. 87, 1025, emphasis added, 2008]

It’s not surprising that anti-gay groups would rely on
fear mongering and propaganda to scare people into opposing LGBT equality.
Frankly, it’s just easier to get people to vote based on fear
and intolerance than it is to get them to accept minority groups as being equal
and deserving of fair treatment. As James Wenzel,
et al., explained in 1998:

The problem for tolerance, and
hence for democratic government, is that while the urge to repress potential
threats has a strong, potentially genetically transmitted (see Willhoite 1977),
affective component, a tolerant response requires the commitment of substantial
cognitive resources. This ingrained propensity to respond in an intolerant fashion
must be overcome by resort to reasoned argument. Citizens must be convinced
that reason requires that they ignore their initial impulses toward what they
perceive as self-preservation and extend rights to those whom they view as
threatening and potentially destructive. Ballot choices involving unpopular
minority groups create a context where citizens must make choices about these
groups on the basis of their affect toward the groups, in combination with the
information received during the petition drive and campaign. [Citizens
As Legislators, Ohio State University Press, emphasis added, 1998]

This approach isn’t just theoretical. Groups like
NOM and MassResistance have already demonstrated their willingness to
successfully distribute widely discreditedanti-gaypropaganda in order to
sway public opinion. In fact, deliberately disseminating misinformation to
influence voters is becoming a major component of
NOM’s political strategy.

This strategy was on display most
obviously during California’s 2008 battle over Proposition 8. Just a few weeks
before the ballot initiative to prohibit same-sex marriage came up for a vote, severalpolls
found that a majority of likely California voters opposed the initiative.

NOM became heavily invested in the
fight to pass Prop 8, spending nearly $1 million
in out-of-state money and creating the iconic “Gathering Storm”
television ad.

By the time the Prop 8 votes were
counted, 52 percent of voters had approved
of the measure, ending marriage equality in the Golden State.

A similar story played out in
Maine near the end of 2009.

Severalpolls
conducted shortly before the state’s referendum vote found that a majority of
voters supported keeping the state’s marriage equality law on the books.
Opposition to the law hovered around 40 percent in both polls.

When the vote
totals came in, 53 percent of voters ended up voting to repeal the law, more than a 10-point increase in
opposition.

Maine and California aren’t isolated incidents, either. In a 1997 study, political scientist Barbara Gamble
conducted a review of 74 state and local initiatives to restrict the
civil rights of minority groups between 1959 and 1993. Voters approved 78 percent of those initiatives, despite
endorsing only a third of all initiatives and popular
referenda in that period. Results were even grimmer for LGBT-specific
initiatives:

Gay men and lesbians have
seen their civil rights put to a popular vote more often than any other group. Almost
60% of the civil rights initiatives have involved gay rights issues. The
measures have included efforts to repeal gay rights ordinances, to remove
sexual orientation as a protected category in housing and employment laws, to
enact and repeal domestic partnership laws, to prohibit lesbians and gay men
from teaching in public schools, to declare homosexuality "abnormal,
wrong, unnatural, and peverse," and to prohibit jurisdictions from passing
new gay rightslaws. Of the 43 gay rights initiatives that have reached
the ballot, 88% have sought to restrict the rights of gay men and lesbians by
repealing existing gay rights laws or forbidding legislatures to pass new ones.
Voters approved 79% of these restrictive measures. [American Journal
of Political Science, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 1997]

Gambler’s findings were confirmed by a 2011 study by Daniel C. Lewis which found that states that
embraced directdemocracy were more likely to
have adopted same-sex marriage bans.

Proponents of voter initiatives might respond by arguing
that referendums allow the public to openly and fully discuss controversial
issues, educating citizens about same-sex marriage,
and accurately reflecting the popular will.

While these arguments might normally be persuasive, they
make less sense in the context of propaganda-driven anti-gay referendums. As
William Adams wrote in 1994:

[A]
closer evaluation of these benefits reveals that the normal advantages of
ballot propositions are considerably weaker with the antigay measures.
The issue-avoidance consideration is not present with these measures because
over one hundred jurisdictions have approved sexual orientation discrimination
and a number of other jurisdictions have considered it. n86 These
plebiscites are trying to remove the issue from the agenda, rather than add to
it. The misinformation supplied by the proponents of these measures undercuts
much of the benefit to be gained from public discussion of gay, lesbian, and
bisexual equality rights. Whether this issue truly expresses the public
will is open to debate. Certainly, the issue of whether the public interest is
being served by these measures is hotly contested by many civil rights
activists. [Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 55, 583, emphasis added, Summer 1994]

The anti-gay industry
should come clean about its motives for demanding public votes on the right of
gays and lesbians. For groups like NOM, voter initiatives aren’t about
democracy; They’re about spending millions
of dollars lying to the public and scaring on-the-fence voters into opposing
LGBT equality.